Mahjong (1996, Edward Yang) (Patreon)

54/100

Easy to see why this gets filed alongside Confucian Confusion, though it's a great deal more erratic (owing in part to how much of the dialogue is in English, spoken as a first language only by the ensemble's weakest actor) and to my mind not nearly as effective. Or maybe it's just that I prefer my portraits of floundering hustlers in '90s Taipei elegant and fizzy rather than desperate and kind of ugly. Yang attempts a tricky tonal balance here, first evident in the long and deeply uncomfortable sequence that sees Alison pressured into sleeping with her new boyfriend's three roommates upon demand; I wouldn't say that we're encouraged to chuckle indulgently and think "scammer boys will be scammer boys," exactly, but Alison as a character lacks the depth that would make her eventual capitulation properly horrific. It's just sort of a thing that happens, part of the whatever-we-can-get tapestry. Same goes for much of the intrigue involving Red Fish's father—I never quite got a handle on the nature of whatever swindle Angela was ostensibly responsible for many years previously, so the whole "let's convince her the apartment is haunted" business felt a little random (albeit funny at times). And then stuff like the ironic switcheroo in which Hong Kong breaks down after Angela's friends sexually objectify him was too cute for my taste. (Plus that relies on Chang Chen's ability as a dramatic actor, of which I've been skeptical for over a quarter century.) Don't mean to sound too critical, as there are plenty of terrific moments here, including a laugh that might have been louder than any I heard at Confucian Confusion last week ("So they're at the Hard Rock?"); Leun-leun and Marthe's burgeoning romance is very sweet, and I was quite impressed by Tang Tsung-sheng's wily energy as Red Fish, right up to the point at which he's required to do something that just feels overly violent for this context (and makes the shift into a romcom ending not at all long afterward kinda weird). Plays like a transitional work, but Yang had already deftly made the transition, and Yi Yi abandons pretty much everything he experimented with in those two films (thereby registering to most people as a return to form). A mess with benefits.